Monday, January 25, 2010

Jim Carrey tweeted this about ten minutes ago on Twitter, giving us yet another reason to feel good about our decision not to pay a cable or satellite corporation for the privilege of watching other corporations' television programs. And if you're reading this blog on a device that doesn't show the image up above, Mr. Carrey's tweet reads:

television is weirdos judging weirdos viewed by weirdos who are just glad there are weirder weirdos out there. like me DAMN IT! %^(

Sunday, January 24, 2010

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.

This quotation from the Great Emancipator seems especially appropriate in this week when the five conservative members of the Supreme Court fully removed the previous restrictions on corporate speech in political contexts andgave the corporations of America -- and the rest of the world -- "corporate personhood" that called for the protection of corporate "free speech" rights, with all the money that they can throw behind that speech. Imagine how sponsored speech will drown out real human speech when fully unleashed. The Fox-sponsored Tea Parties will seem like a tea party when there's so much corporate "grass roots" Astroturf covering the American landscape that we'll never need another lawnmower.

Though it's nothing to laugh about, it was very hard not to play with the idea of giving corporations even fuller personalities under the #CorporatePersonhood hashtag on Twitter a couple of days ago:

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and I sent a letter to President Obama Friday, urging him to override the DoJ’s decision to try the Christmas Day Bomber in civilian court and designate him as an enemy combatant, so that he might still be interrogated in order to glean critical intelligence that might avert a future terrorist attack.

So if the Republican right-wing leadership and their teabagger shock troops were intellectually consistent in any way they'd want Scott Roeder waterboarded at Guantanamo to find other murderous Christianist terrorist cells, wouldn't they? I guess that, in certain world views, successfully shooting a doctor in a church is much less of a crime than unsuccessfully lighting your underpants on fire.

But there are many on the Right supporting the murderer of Dr. George Tiller during services at his Lutheran Church back in May. Just look at the comments on this Fox News article supporting Christianist extremism and murder. Even the judge is considering allowing the jury to consider a verdict of voluntary manslaughter if this admitted murderer can prove he held an "unreasonable but honest belief" that he had to use force to protect another. What if Islamist extremists were allowed to make the same argument in an open court? Imagine the volume of the squeals from Cornyn and the teabaggers.

The hashtag #3wordsconservativeshate took off on Twitter on Friday night, so I just wanted to preserve a few of them as a snapshot of the state of the hate in late January of twenty ten:The triplets of words used in the Wordle up above : national public radio - john fitzgerald kennedy - public library funding - strong public schools - strong public option - Reagan rose taxes - #3wordsconservativeshate - true blue liberal - corporations aren't people - teabaggers teabaggers teabaggers - Franklin Delano Roosevelt - immigrants are people - gay marriage tolerance- gay feminist mother - hillary rodham clinton - Obama is president - Blackwater are mercenaries - Yes, Obama won - Yes We Can - Yes We Did - Dick Cheney's Daughter - Liberal policies Work - peace, equality, freedom -Universal Health Care - Rational Thought Process - Public Healthcare Option - Justice for All - Share the wealth - Basic Human Compassion - Proud American Liberal - Greed is Bad - Equal Rights Amendment - Liberté Egalité Fraternité - I'm Gay Mom! - and I left out hundreds and hundreds more, but these contributions seemed (to me) representative.Unfortunately, #3wordsconservativeshate never came anywhere near the quantity of #3wordslibhate as shown here at Trendistic.com. So here are three more words: Quality Not Quantity.Images of Wordles from Wordle.net are licensed by a Creative Commons License.

Media Matters for America also has the Pat Robertson transcript for the segment up above on their website, but here's the important bit: " ...They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, "We will serve you if you will get us free from the French." True story. And so, the devil said, "OK, it's a deal." And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.... "

Hey, maybe they just should have remained slaves. Right Pat?

As an example of the complete intellectual (if not financial) bankruptcy of these money-grubbing TV preachers, the Revolution in Haiti at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries was fought against the French revolutionary government and THE Napoleon -- Napoleon Bonaparte -- not "Napoleon III and whatever" who ruled fifty years later. I'm also not sure where Pat Robertson got his "facts" about and direct quote from "the devil," but I'm pretty sure that's a mythological creature incapable of speaking directly to non-psychotic humans, and I haven't seen his (its) name mentioned in any history books as being a key player in the events of 1791-1804.

Despite the ridiculousness of these claims though, the reanimated zombie that used to be Jerry Falwell rose from its grave today and said of Pat Robertson's attempt to link earthquakes to pacts with the devil, "I totally concur!"

Here's yet another reason to kill your television. In her column in this morning's New York Times, "The Biggest Loser," about the wrong-headed scheduling moves of NBC chief Jeff Zucker, Maureen Dowd describes the television norm against which Mr. Zucker has sinned by shuffling Jay Leno between traditional late night and primetime slots:

"… older Americans … have always watched the networks in a particular way. The kids come home, do their homework, the family has dinner. They’re in front of the TV by 8, and 8:30 is known as the dog-walking slot. At 9, it’s time for more comedy. As they get tired, they like to watch a fictional drama that leads into the real drama of the late local news. And then they like to laugh again so that those images of war or a local murder are not the last thing they see before bed."

Hell in 95 words, and one of the reasons explaining why so many Americans would prefer to work late at the office.

Monday, January 11, 2010

If there's any justice in the world, then Jonathan Safran Foer's first work of nonfiction (after the brilliant novels Everything Is Illuminatedand Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) will do to factory farms what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did to DDT. At least it should turn a significant percentage of its readers into vegetarians and vegans. Or at the very least it will create more conscious eaters.

I finished reading this book on the train from work tonight. I couldn't return it to the library without sharing at least one quotation:

"Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory -- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own."

This rationale for killing your television has nothing to do with the news today that the Fox News Channel has added Ms. Sarah Palin to their stable of on-air talent. This has to do with television watching in general, and its effect on your overall health.

Click the link after the quote of the day for more details.

"...researchers monitored 8,800 adults for six years to see what impact watching television had on their long-term health. They found that each hour a day spent in front of the television increased the risk of death from all causes by 11%. It also raised the risk of dying from cancer by 9% and the risk of heart disease-related death by 18%."

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Okay, it has nothing to do with politics, but of all the sentences that I read this morning this is the sentence (and a half) that popped out at me in my internet skimming and grazing.

"Keith was now well launched on the bullet train of the fifties where the minutes often dragged but the years tumbled over one another and disappeared. And the mirror was trying to tell him something."

Maybe it has to do with the fact that I boarded that bullet train myself a few years ago, but I think it has more to do with the fact that Martin Amis has written some of the most perfect sentences in the English language in the last thirty years and I look forward to every one that comes from his pen, even at times when his political opinions may not be in line with mine. The mystery is when I am going to get a chance to read this book. The Guardian article this morning says "next month", but Amazon.co.uk has no price listed for the book yet and has two listings, one with a pub date of September 2008 and one with a pub date of February 4, 2010. The Amazon.com(.usa) site lists a pub date of May 11 and doesn't even have a cover image posted (I'm sure that it won't be the UK image you see to the left). I guess I'll be adding to my personal carbon footprint by having this book shipped across the Atlantic Ocean in February.

Republicans have had no trouble breaking the other ten commandments in recent years, so it probably shouldn't come as any surprise that they have decided to ignore the eleventh too. "The Eleventh Commandment" was created to silence liberal Republican (yes, Virginia, there once was such an animal) criticism of Ronald Reagan in his run for Governor of California to avoid a repeat of the liberal Republican criticism of Barry Goldwater that had exposed him as a dangerous joke in the 1964 presidential election. The liberals, of course, shut their mouths and a grade-B moviestar and host of "Borax Death Valley Days" began his improbable rise to the chief executive offices in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.

Patti & Ronald Reagan Only Two Years Before Moving from Boraxo Commercials to the Governor's Mansion.

Luckily for us though, the conservatives in the Republican Party in 2010 do not seem as anxious to shut their mouths for the sake of party unity (unless the party unifies behind their own very particular brand of wingnuttiness).Here are a few promising signs of the coming GOP fratricide just in the last two days:

Tomorrow's New York Times Magazine: "The First Senator from the Tea Party" in which ultraconservative wunderkind Marco Rubio's challenge to the merely conservative Charlie Crist is described in great detail.

So, are there any Republicans still observing the Eleventh Commandment? Of course there are. You don't hear Republican moderates in Maine or elsewhere in the Northeast speaking ill of their fellow GOPpers, do you?

I have to stop looking around the darker corners of the Twitter and the blogosphere.

When a blog has to run a sidebar disclaimer reading ...

Legal Notice

This blog does not promote, support, condone, encourage, advocate, nor in any way endorses [sic] any racist ideologies, nor any armed and/or violent revolutionary, seditionist,[sic] criminal, and/or terrorist activities!!! The author of this blog assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of information contained in this blog!!! This blog is for information and entertainment purposes only!!![sick]

... and places that disclaimer to the right of incoherent obscenity-laced racist rants and immediately below links to white supremacist websites and a sidebar advertisement for a t-shirt bearing a parody of Shepard Fairey's iconic Barack Obama 'HOPE' poster with the President's head tilted to the side, his eyes closed, and a noose around his neck above the word 'ROPE', and takes the nom de blog et twitter of "Obama is a Monkey," has the joke gone further than a mere parody of right-wing imbecility?

If you don't want to immediately read the rest of Charles M. Blow's column,"G.O.P. Grief and Grieving," in this morning's New York Times after reading this first paragraph, then you're probably reading the wrong blog here at TrueBlueLiberal dot org:

The attack on the Republican establishment by the tea party folks grabs the gaze like a really bad horror flick — some version of “Hee Haw” meets “28 Days Later.” It’s fascinating. But it also raises a serious question: Are these the desperate thrashings of a dying movement or the labor pains of a new one?

His thesis is that American conservatism is going through the clichéd stages of grief over the Democratic triumph in 2008 -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance -- and that the teabaggers are now in that angry stage where many of us found ourselves in the early years of the Dubya regime.One less humorous take on the tea party movement is hinted at in a companion opinion piece in today's Times from Gail Collins prompted by the Washington Wizards' Gilbert Arenas and his recent problem with gun possession. She cites the fact that the vast majority of Americans, and even 82% of NRA members, want to be able to prevent terror suspects from buying guns at unregulated gun shows, and wonders about the minority opinion.

Let us pause for a moment to consider the 9 percent of respondents who said they thought this was a bad idea. Perhaps they live in the same compound with the 1 out of 10 dentists who did not think patients who chewed gum should go for the sugarless kind.

My guess is that all 9% of these gun nuts are also angry teabaggers. This angry minority on the right wing's fringe is much better armed than the hard-core opposition to George W. Bush was in 2002-2003.

Sunday, January 03, 2010

Here are the quotes of the day to remind you of the Republican game plan for 2010. Don't expect any change from 2009's stage-setting remark from the Republican Party's chief over-the-air gasbag, which appeared just before President Obama's inauguration:

I would be honored if the Drive-By Media headlined me all day long: "Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails." Somebody's gotta say it.

There's a preview of the coming continuing obstructionism in an article from this morning's Washington Post about the current state of California's finances. There's no reason to think that Republicans in Congress and the media will do anything more than follow Nancy Reagan's old drug advice to "Just Say No," hoping that any resulting government gridlock will be blamed on the Democrats in November:

[...] The minority party spied opportunity in fiscal collapse. If the majority failed to govern the state, then the voters would turn on them, or so the theory went.That raises a troubling question: What happens when one of the two major parties does not see a political upside in solving problems and has the power to keep those problems from being solved?

~~~~~~~~~~~Knowing that the writers of the right-wing blogosphere and twitterverse have already set their CAPS LOCK keys and turned off their spelling and grammar checkers in order to jump into the fray with attacks and made-up "facts" in twenty ten, I thought that it was time to start writing more regularly here at http://TrueBlueLiberal.org and I even opened up a new presence on Twitter at @TrueBlueLiberal , largely for the same reason that I started this blog in 2004: to help protect the label "Liberal" from those who have no understanding of its meaning, but are happy to hurl it as an insult.Happy 2010.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To reinforce your resolve to stick to a diet in twenty ten that's better for you and animals and the planet, you don't even have to read all of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals. Simply read this short article on AlterNet today: "Yummy! Ammonia-Treated Pink Slime Now in Most U.S. Ground Beef."Actually, maybe you don't even have to read the whole article, just read the title of the article again.

Friday, January 01, 2010

Somewhere in the basement of a house in which I once lived there may still be an old VHS tape with the whole second set from this concert sitting on a shelf (of course, I no longer have a VHS player).

If I remember correctly, we had just bought our very first VCR and this concert was broadcast on a New York UHF station (because I don't remember having cable at the time). We got home from a New Year's Eve party at 2am and this concert was being broadcast live from the Oakland Coliseum, long after all the other prepackaged time-shifted New Year's Eve shows had been off the air. This video contains "In the Midnight Hour," which was the first song of the second set, preceded by the arrival of the giant New Year's cake and balloon drop at midnight (3am EST) with the classic commentary from Ken Kesey and Fr. Guido Sarducci (a.k.a. Don Novello). Brilliant! What was Ken on?

About Me

According to the results of free non-scientific online tests, TBL found that he was "Existentialist", "Communist", and "A Grammar God," i.e., if he were a short wall-eyed Frenchman rather than a 6'3" blond American, he would be constantly mistaken for Jean-Paul Sartre!